Chapter 24 | Part 5 | The Aftermath

Blood from both nostrils. Blood from her left ear. A thin red line tracing down from the corner of her eye like a tear that had taken a wrong turn.

Maris came back to the world in pieces. The screaming stopped when her throat gave out, replaced by a hoarse rasp that hurt worse than the sound it replaced. Her body was a catalogue of damage. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Her left leg had gone numb from the hip down. The headache that had plagued her for days had resolved into a single point of white-hot pressure at the base of her skull, specific and terrible, as though someone had driven a nail through the bone and left it there.

Xandor was speaking. She couldn’t hear the words. Her ears were full of a high, thin ringing that erased the lower frequencies, leaving only its own monotone. She watched his mouth move and understood, from the shapes, that he was asking if she could hear him.

She nodded. The motion sent the world lurching sideways.

“Don’t move.” His voice arrived belatedly, filtered through the ringing, tinny and distant. “You’re bleeding from places that shouldn’t bleed. Stay still.”

Dulint’s face appeared above her. The dwarf looked like he’d aged a decade in the minutes she’d been gone. His jaw was clenched so hard the muscles stood out in cords along his neck. Behind him, Balin stood with his sword drawn, pointed at nothing, the reflex of a young man who’d heard his friend screaming and reached for the only tool he had.

“Sheathe it, lad.” Eldric, calm as stone. “There’s nothing to cut.”

Balin didn’t sheathe it. His hands were shaking too.

Xandor pressed a fresh cloth beneath her nose. The bleeding had slowed but hadn’t stopped, a steady seep that turned the fabric pink and then red and then dark. He tilted her head, checked her ear, wiped the blood trail from her cheek with a gentleness that didn’t match the rigid set of his shoulders.

“How long?” she managed. Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone who’d spent a week shouting into wind.

“Seven minutes,” Eldric said. “You seized for the first three. Went rigid for two. Then you screamed for the last two.”

Seven minutes. The previous record had been three. She filed that fact away in the part of her mind that still functioned, the clinical archivist who catalogued damage with detached precision because the alternative was acknowledging how close she’d come to not coming back.

“Water,” she said, and Balin was there before the word finished, pressing a waterskin to her lips. She drank and tasted copper underneath the cold.

They gave her ten minutes. She used five of them lying still, letting the ringing fade, letting her hands slow their trembling from violent to merely persistent. Then she pushed herself to sitting. Xandor tried to stop her. She pushed past his hands with a stubbornness that was less about strength and more about the need to deliver what she’d seen before the details started to erode.

“I saw him.”

They went quiet. All four of them. Even the forest seemed to hold still.

“The drowning man. I saw him clearly. I was inside his vision, his body. I felt what he felt.” She wiped blood from her upper lip and looked at her fingers. Red. She’d been looking at a lot of red lately. “He’s a dark elf. The kind Xandor named before. Grey-black skin, white hair, pointed ears. Young. Younger than I thought. Younger than Balin.”

Balin flinched.

“He was inside a volcano. Something alive in there, something enormous. It was testing him, or changing him, or both. I felt the pain. It was…” She stopped. Searched for the word that would make them understand and found nothing adequate. “He reached into it voluntarily. Whatever it was doing to him, he chose it. And it nearly killed him.”

“Why?” Eldric asked. The soldier’s question, practical, economical.

“I don’t know why. I know what it felt like. Desperation. He had no other options. This was the last door and he walked through it knowing it might not have another side.”

Dulint crouched beside her. “The Beacon. You said something before, during the convulsions. You said the word inside.”

She looked at him. Then at the pack. The Beacon had gone quiet since the vision broke, its usual pulse dampened to a faint, exhausted flicker.

“He’s carrying the other half of it.”

Silence.

“The Beacon, the artifact in your pack. It’s a piece of something larger. The counterpart is inside him. Not in his possession. In his body. Woven into him. I felt it answer ours. The same frequency, the same signal. Two halves of the same broken thing, trying to find each other across a distance I can’t measure.”

“Can’t measure how?” Xandor leaned forward. The druid’s eyes had sharpened in a way Maris had never seen, the look of a man confronting a theory he’d hoped was wrong.

“He’s not on the other side of a mountain. He’s on the other side of something else. A barrier. Not physical, not magical. Structural. Like the edge of a map where the cartographer stopped drawing because there was nothing left to draw.” She pressed her palm against her forehead. The nail of pain pulsed. “The Beacon isn’t pointing us toward a place. It’s pointing us toward a crack. A flaw in the barrier where the two halves can reach each other.”

“A flaw,” Xandor repeated. “In a barrier between worlds.”

“I don’t know if that’s what it is. I know what it felt like. Two surfaces pressed together that shouldn’t touch. And a fracture running through the join.”

Eldric stood and paced three steps and stopped. The soldier’s method for processing information his training hadn’t prepared him for: move, then think, then move again. “So we’re walking toward a crack in the world to find a dark elf who’s carrying half an artifact inside his body.”

“Yes.”

“And on the other side of this crack, inside a volcano, something is turning him into what, exactly?”

Maris closed her eyes. The face was still there. Burned into her, the way the luminous threads had burned into his skin. Young. Frightened. Choosing to endure.

“A weapon,” she said. “Or a key. I couldn’t tell the difference. Whatever the presence in that volcano is, it’s remaking him. Filling him with something that has the same resonance as the Beacon. And he’s letting it because he thinks it’s his only chance.”

“His only chance at what?”

“Surviving.” She opened her eyes. “He’s been surviving alone far too long. And the thing inside his chest is the only reason he’s still alive.”

The forest settled around them. Wind through branches. The creak of frozen wood. The Beacon flickered in Dulint’s pack, weak and spent, a candle after a bonfire.

“There’s one more thing,” Maris said.

They waited.

“He saw me. At the end. He looked right at me and he knew I was there. He tried to speak.” Her voice cracked. She let it crack. There was no clinical distance left to hide behind. “He asked who I was. I tried to answer. I couldn’t get through. But he knows, now, that someone is on the other side.”

She looked at each of them. Dulint carried his secrets and his guilt like a second pack, and it was bowing him. Balin still gripped his sword, too young to know what to do when cutting solved nothing. Eldric, with his pragmatism and his steady hands. Xandor, with his knowledge and his careful eyes.

“He’s real. He’s carrying our artifact’s twin. And something terrible is making him into something he wasn’t born to be.” She sat straighter, ignoring the protest from every damaged part of her body. “We need to find that crack in the barrier. Not for the Beacon. For him.”

Dulint looked at Eldric. Eldric looked at Xandor. Xandor looked at Maris, who was bleeding from her ear and her nose and the corner of her eye, who had just endured seven minutes inside someone else’s agony, and who was already planning to do it again.

“North,” Dulint said. It wasn’t a question.

“North,” Maris confirmed. “And faster than we’ve been going.”

The Beacon pulsed once, faintly. Whether it agreed or simply had nothing left, Maris no longer cared to ask.

Neither did it.

End of Chapter 24.5 —> 25.1: The Approach: Beyond the Crystal Fields